Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays eBook

In other words, we must ask what modern institution
has a future before it? What modern institution
may have swollen to six times its present size in
the social heat and growth of the future? I do
not think the Garden City will grow: but of that
I may speak in my next and last article of this series.
I do not think even the ordinary Elementary School,
with its compulsory education, will grow. Too
many unlettered people hate the teacher for teaching;
and too many lettered people hate the teacher for
not teaching. The Garden City will not bear much
blossom; the young idea will not shoot, unless it
shoots the teacher. But the one flowering tree
on the estate, the one natural expansion which I think
will expand, is the institution we call the Prison.

Prisons for All

If the capitalists are allowed to erect their constructive
capitalist community, I speak quite seriously when
I say that I think Prison will become an almost universal
experience. It will not necessarily be a cruel
or shameful experience: on these points (I concede
certainly for the present purpose of debate) it may
be a vastly improved experience. The conditions
in the prison, very possibly, will be made more humane.
But the prison will be made more humane only in order
to contain more of humanity. I think little
of the judgment and sense of humour of any man who
can have watched recent police trials without realising
that it is no longer a question of whether the law
has been broken by a crime; but, now, solely a question
of whether the situation could be mended by an imprisonment.
It was so with Tom Mann; it was so with Larkin; it
was so with the poor atheist who was kept in gaol
for saying something he had been acquitted of saying:
it is so in such cases day by day. We no longer
lock a man up for doing something; we lock him up in
the hope of his doing nothing. Given this principle,
it is evidently possible to make the mere conditions
of punishment more moderate, or—­(more probably)
more secret. There may really be more mercy in
the Prison, on condition that there is less justice
in the Court. I should not be surprised if, before
we are done with all this, a man was allowed to smoke
in prison, on condition, of course, that he had been
put in prison for smoking.

Now that is the process which, in the absence of democratic
protest, will certainly proceed, will increase and
multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it.
Prison may even lose its disgrace for a little time:
it will be difficult to make it disgraceful when men
like Larkin can be imprisoned for no reason at all,
just as his celebrated ancestor was hanged for no
reason at all. But capitalist society, which
naturally does not know the meaning of honour, cannot
know the meaning of disgrace: and it will still
go on imprisoning for no reason at all. Or rather
for that rather simple reason that makes a cat spring
or a rat run away.